For many of us who grew up in the 1980s, Tron wasn’t just a movie — it was a revelation. It gave a face to the dawn of the digital age. It inspired a generation of dreamers, coders, and digital artists to believe that technology could be beautiful, limitless, and even spiritual.
As someone who started building websites during the dot-com bubble — even back in the era of 1990s — Tron was the kind of story that made you want to “change the world” with a keyboard and a dream. The neon light cycles, the hum of the Grid, and Jeff Bridges’ effortless cool embodied that feeling that anything was possible in the digital frontier.
High Hopes After a Legacy of Glitches
After Tron: Legacy struggled to connect with audiences, Tron: Ares looked poised to reboot the franchise with style. The trailers were sleek, the visuals dazzling, and the marketing promised a return to form. The music, teased with shades of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, suggested a darker, more mature evolution of the original theme.
But when the lights dimmed, what we got felt more like a system error than a sequel.
When Style Outruns Substance
Tron: Ares suffers from disconnection — not the digital kind, but the emotional one. The film introduces new characters that feel detached from the original universe, leaving longtime fans searching for a thread of continuity. The central dynamic between AI and humanity had potential but got lost in an underdeveloped love story that never quite boots up.
Jared Leto’s performance as Ares teeters between divine and disinterested, walking the line between Jesus-like mystique and vacant stare. You can’t help but wonder whether the film relied more on his image than his acting.
The real-world motorbike sequences were some of the most thrilling moments, nodding to the franchise’s visual legacy. And yes — the soundtrack slaps. But sound and spectacle alone can’t carry a film when the story feels like it’s been left behind in a corrupted file.
A Visual Triumph, A Narrative Crash
Visually, Ares is stunning — a masterclass in digital cinematography and lighting. But beyond the surface, it’s hollow. The pacing drags, the direction feels uninspired, and the soul of what made Tron groundbreaking is nowhere to be found.
What was once a story about innovation and imagination has been reduced to a shiny shell of corporate filmmaking — a metaphor, perhaps, for the very technology the original celebrated.
Final Verdict 1/5 stars
As much as I wanted to love it, Tron: Ares left me unplugged. It’s a movie that looks incredible but feels empty. Unless Steven Spielberg himself steps in to reboot the franchise, this might be the end of the line for the Grid.
For now, I’ll stick with the original — where imagination, and Spielberg’s pure artistic genius still glowed brighter than CGI.
